On 23 August 2013 07:49, David Nadlinger <code@klickverbot.at> wrote:
On Thursday, 22 August 2013 at 03:07:39 UTC, Manu wrote:
And why is there no LDC binary?

There are links to the LDC Linux/OS X binaries on the dlang.org download page.

As for the Windows/MinGW32 binaries, the last LDC release does officially include them (see the release announcement), but the MinGW port is still very much in an alpha/beta state.

Oh okay. Well it would definitely be worth writing that somewhere.
I knew it worked (more-or-less) on Windows, I've built it from source before and created working code. But last time I used it there was still no Win64 exceptions.
My thread is really about the experience as an end-user trying to get a working compiler; It shouldn't be hard.

For example, there is still at least one wrong-code issues with 80 bit reals, and the test suite does not completely pass yet. Somewhat contrary to GDC, in case of LDC there are actual released versions that are guaranteed to be stable to a certain extent (i.e. the test suite passes on all relevant systems, …), and I was afraid that prematurely advertising the relatively fresh MinGW port would draw a wrong picture of the overall quality.

I think people would appreciate this, but it's probably worth writing this clearly on the download page.
A binary marked very clearly as alpha/beta, and perhaps a list of known issues might be nice for end users to access at a glance.

As the GDC/MinGW binaries are probably not more stable either, though, yet are linked on the dlang.org download page, I guess we should add the LDC MinGW link to the page as well, if maybe qualified with an "experimental" note.

Mmm.
Well, I can't make the GDC binaries work at all... there are missing dependencies.

Another issue is that a fairly recent mingw-w64 snapshot is needed in addition to the LDC download for GCC (linker, libraries). Older ones don't have my necessary fixes yet, and I don't know if they have made it into the "original" MinGW (without -w64) project yet. What would be the best way to add this to the/a download page?

Would it be better to produce a distribution package that includes the working mingw snapshot? It's quite annoying when a distro package has dependencies.
I think Windows end-users aren't used to meticulous versioning like Linux users. Things like version numbers are rarely in the paths/filenames. The result of this is, they might already have a mingw on their system that they presume is fine (or don't know is fine), or may be reluctant to install another instance of a package they already have, thinking it's basically the same.
Putting everything in the one package sounds more fool-proof to me.

Just a thought that might be convenient for users would be if LDC and GDC collaborated on a single complete mingw package that included both GDC and LDC compilers... Perhaps annoying to maintain/coordinate, but I'd say at this point, most users will end out with both toolchains on their system anyway, and when you have multiple mingw installations on a machine, the PATH variable get's kinda awkward.